The Rant Institute

Today, America’s income inequality problem is as bad as it has ever been, and for a number of reasons it's only getting worse. This fact guarantees that the check writers will continue to appoint the law makers they pay for. And by doing so, these “principle architects of policy,” as Adam Smith referred to them, will continue to make certain “that their own interests are "most peculiarly attended to,” no matter how grievous the effect on others.”   Naturally, the most important aim of the check-writers is to ensure their own checking accounts continue to grow as much as possible. To do that, they use a variety of “invisible hands” to help pilfer the checking accounts of everyone else. By one measure, doing so has contributed to making U.S. income inequality the highest it’s been since 1928, according to the PEW Research Center. Worse still is the fact that w ealth inequality is even greater than income inequality.  NYU economist Edward Wolff, for example, found...

Religion is the art of turning fear and superstition into the commodity of Jesus Christ in order to bottle God like Coca Cola. This divinely patented process ensures that the more you drink the blood of your savior, the thirstier you will surely become.  All those who peddle such sugary spirits benefit greatly from God's absence, of course, as his presence would instantly satisfy the deep desire that religion both preys upon and helps to exacerbate. And as a result, there would be no need for religion anymore, and overnight, $4.8 trillion would simply vanish from the U.S. economy, according to a Georgetown Study completed in 2016. The reason God's impromptu return would be so ruinous for religion is because it is only with the desire for God that people can be controlled. Having God, on the other hand, would be like trying to control a lion with the promise of a gyro sandwich after it had already gorged itself on a gazelle. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, satisfying a ...

I saw the latest Brad Pitt movie, Fury , and was struck by a particular scene that seemed to be analogous to a mental orchestration of competing ideas.  On the surface, the movie is the story of a team of 5 men who form the crew members of a Sherman Tank, lead by Don "Wardaddy" Collier, played by Brad Pitt. Yet on a deeper level, the movie is about the inner workings of the human mind itself. The Sherman Tank the team travels around in throughout the movie is analogous to the human head, and each person represents a different way of interpreting and reacting to the same situation. The one scene that is particularly interesting in this respect happens when, after arriving in a small town, "Wardaddy" decides to play Dad after he finds two women hiding in an upstairs apartment of a nearby building. Taking the youngest and newest member of his tank team with him, Wardaddy enters their apartment and, after checking all the rooms, closes the front door. By closing th...